An anonymous reader quotes Ars Technica:
People who find security vulnerabilities commonly run into difficulties when reporting them to the responsible company. But it’s less common for such situations to turn into tense trade-show confrontations — and competing claims of assault and blackmail. Yet that’s what happened when executives at Atrient — a casino technology firm headquartered in West Bloomfield, Michigan — stopped responding to two UK-based security researchers who had reported some alleged security flaws. The researchers thought they had reached an agreement regarding payment for their work, but nothing final ever materialized. On February 5, 2019, one of the researchers — Dylan Wheeler, a 23-year-old Australian living in the UK — stopped by Atrient’s booth at a London conference to confront the company’s chief operating officer.

What happened next is in dispute. Wheeler says that Atrient COO Jessie Gill got in a confrontation with him and yanked off his conference lanyard; Gill insists he did no such thing, and he accused Wheeler of attempted extortion.

The debacle culminated in legal threats and a lot of mudslinging, with live play-by-play commentary as it played out on Twitter.

Ars Technica calls the story “practically a case study in the problems that can arise with vulnerability research and disclosure,” adding “the vast majority of companies have no clear mechanism for outsiders to share information about security gaps.”

A security research director at Rapid7 joked his first reaction was “man, I wish a vendor would punch me for disclosure. Boy, that beats any bug bounty.” But they later warned, “It’s on us as an industry not only to train corporate America on how to take disclosure, but also we need to do a little more training for people who find these bugs — especially today, in an era where bug outings are kind of normal now — to not expect someone to be necessarily grateful when one shows up.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Casino Accused of Withholding Bug Bounty, Then Assaulting ‘Ethical Hacker’

On Friday the Ocean Cleanup project posted a status update after their giant U-shaped plastic trap lost a 60-foot section in January and had to be towed back to land:

During the first four months that the system was offshore, we were able to confirm many of the key features of the cleanup system. We also encountered some unscheduled learning opportunities; notably 1) the system hasn’t been able to retain the plastic it caught, and 2) the floater suffered from a structural failure, causing an 18-meter end section to disconnect from the rest of the system, just before the end of 2018.

Its four months in the Pacific ocean validated much of their proposed solution, including the device’s U-shaped configuration and its ability to orient with the wind. No harmful environmental impacts were observed, and in fact “Plastic concentrations in and around the system were much higher than in any other location in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch; and, although the periods the plastic was retained in the system were not yet of sufficient length, the system did capture and concentrate plastic.”
The bottom line: they’re going to try again:
The engineering team is using these conclusions and results to update the design and prepare for relaunch. Using this thorough understanding, we hope to resolve the issues that are known to us and prove our technology, but we do realize that there may still be more unidentified challenges ahead. Only further proving the importance of returning to the patch as soon as possible, so we can continue to learn from and optimize the technology…. We now have all hands on deck and we aim to be ready for relaunch within a matter of months.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Ocean Cleanup Foundation Plans Relaunch of Giant Plastic-Catching Trap

An anonymous reader quotes the Associated Press:
Gov. Andrew Cuomo and fellow Democrats who control the Legislature have reached a deal to make New York the third state with a ban on single-use plastic grocery bags as they worked to finalize budget agreements, officials said Friday. The ban would prohibit grocery stores from providing plastic bags for most purchases, something California has been doing since a statewide ban was approved in 2016. Hawaii has an effective statewide ban, with all its counties imposing their own restrictions….
New York’s ban wouldn’t take effect until next March. The plan also calls for allowing local governments the option to impose a 5-cent fee on paper bags, with 3 cents going to the state’s Environmental Protection Fund and 2 cents kept by local governments.
Meanwhile, Tennessee’s state House and Senate have passed a different kind of bill — one that bans local Tennessee governments from regulating plastic bags, according to local channel WMC.
One Memphis councilman had proposed allowing the use of plastic bags, but with a seven-cent tax to support clean water initiatives. “But that won’t happen if the governor signs the bill to ‘ban the bans.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – New York Becomes America’s Third State To Ban Plastic Bags

“The U.S. is recommending a 12.5 year prison sentence for Paul Hansmeier, one of the lead attorneys of the controversial law firm Prenda,” reports TorrentFreak:

Last summer, Hansmeier admitted that he is guilty of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, as well as conspiracy to commit money laundering. With the final decision coming up, the Government and the defendant have now issued their sentencing recommendations. According to the Government, it is clear that Hansmeier was the driving force behind the entire scheme…. “Paul Hansmeier selected the pornographic movies for his brother to upload based upon how attractive they would be to BitTorrent users, thus deliberately encouraging the piracy Hansmeier pretended to hate,” the Government writes…

With the IP-addresses that were obtained through this honeypot scheme, Prenda requested subpoenas to obtain the names and addresses of Internet subscribers. These people were then threatened into settling for figures up to $3,000. Whether they were guilty or not appeared to be irrelevant. “Hansmeier was generally content to take this step without investigating whether the subscriber was, in fact, the infringer. Hansmeier thus inflicted plenty of pain on persons who did not, in fact, download his pornographic bait,” the Government writes.
In total, Prenda Law generated roughly $3,000,000 from the fraudulent copyright lawsuits they filed at courts throughout the United States. While it is by no means illegal to go after file-sharers, the Prenda attorneys crossed a line by repeatedly lying to or misleading the courts. Hansmeier also filmed and produced many videos himself, leading the court to believe that these were from a third-party company… Also, the court was led to believe that pirates caused financial damage, even though the videos were never commercially distributed.

Arguing for a sentence of 150 months, the government writes that Hansmeier “was greedy, arrogant, devious, mendacious, and consistently positioned other people to be damaged by his conduct, even as he enjoyed the proceeds of the scheme he orchestrated.” Hansmeier’s attorney counters that his client should spend no more than 87 months in prison, with an additional three years of supervision — and that there should be no fine, since restitution will be paid to those damaged by his scheme.

“Either way,” writes TorrentFreak, “it is clear that the Prenda attorney will likely spend several years in prison.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – US Requests 12-Year Prison Sentence For Prenda ‘Copyright Troll’ Lawyer